You're Doing Great

From the moment my wife’s waters broke, I knew I had some serious shit to sort out.
It was Wednesday morning and I’d just come home from walking the dog.
“Erm, I think you might want to see this,” said my wife, while Charlie the dog trotted off to his bed, his claws clacking on the laminate like my Mum’s knitting needles working on a pair of bootees. 
My wife invited me into the bathroom to inspect her work. The toilet looked like someone had filled it with pink grapefruit squash. As my bowels immediately drew up a blueprint to fill it with something darker, we looked at one another with widening eyes. After nine months, plus a little preamble, the big day had finally begun. 
“Great! Let’s do this!” was my external cover for the internal “Holy shitting fuckballs” that I was now yelling inwardly to myself. 

My wife had been contracting and dilating all around the apartment for over a day or so now. Contracting in the kitchen. Dilating in the bedroom. Contracting on the settee. But instead of rushing to the hospital, we sat and had lunch. My wife, who was behind this idea, assured me all was fine. We’d take our time and head off around 2pm. After all, our bags had been packed for what felt like (and likely was) weeks, and we were all prepared. Within me, a voice (it was mine) was crying “get to the hospital! There’s a baby coming!” but I didn’t want to in any way antagonise the magical woman who was at the centre of all this, so I smiled and said “you’re doing great!”. 

A brief phonecall to the midwife moments later, and we were on our way to the hospital.

But, Berlin being Berlin, by the time we were well on the way to the krankenhaus, my wife found herself contracting in the middle of traffic gridlock due to a protest march closing down a huge chunk of the city centred around the Brandenburg Gate. They love a protest here and, this being any one of seven days in the week, they were jolly well having one. “Smash the paternity!” I yelled out of the window in support, very much a protest virgin and instantly diddling myself out of a few grand in state benefits.

Again, I found myself feeling that I had little to no influence on the overall scenario. Here I was, over 800 miles from home, sat in a traffic jam with my wife – who was 4,222 miles from her hometown of Toronto and contracting all over the car with our first child due to make an appearance and change our lives forever within hours. And what was I doing? Sitting still in the electronically-warmed seat of a hired BMW. An automatic, for crying out loud. I didn’t even have to change gear! Damn it. It was time to be a man, and take control of the situation. 
So, I gently patted my wife’s thigh, looked at her with eyes that I hoped had at least a hint of conviction about them, and said “you’re doing great!”.

An hour and several fraught contractions later, we were through the swarm of radicals and into the geburtshaus, so that my wife could get on with some geburtsing. Actually, the German word for ‘delivery room’ is kreißsaal. There was to be much kreißsing in there too.
We were shown to our small room where we were to spend time together prior to the birth. There was a bed, a couple of chairs, a TV and a huge green birthing ball to bounce and kreiß oneself upon. 
But by far the most exciting thing for my wife was the fact that this is where we would hold our pre-birth picnic. No word of a lie, the event she had spent the whole nine months in excited anticipation of was not the arrival of our daughter, but rather the clingfilm-wrapped sandwiches that I would prepare for our hospital pack-up. 

And so it was that, as the contractions increased in their extremity, we cuddled up on the bed with triangle-cut ham and cheese sarnies and a tube of Pringles. We also had an exceptional bag of snacks prepared for labour. Mars bars. Nuts. Bananas. Haribo. More sandwiches. Every one of our friends – every single one – who had given birth before us had warned us that snacks had to be a priority. A friend of mine ate all the snacks during the labour that led to the birth of his little boy, much to the anger of his wife who had felt more than a little peckish once there was no longer a son inside her. Three years later, and I’m not entirely sure if they’re back on speaking terms yet. 

As I chowed down helplessly on an almond, my wife’s contractions took a fierce and more painful turn. She was now pushing hard against the wall, her arms extended as she lunged with such noisy strength that I was certain that the room was expanding lengthways. “You’re doing great!” I squeaked.

Later, as the contractions that we were timing on an app became shorter, more frequent and infinitely more painful, we were moved to a room with a birthing pool, as per my wife’s wishes. Tina, our brilliant midwife for whom nothing was too much trouble (I know that’s kinda the idea, but still), filled the bath with warm water, wafted around some lavender scent that she’d kept secreted somewhere and put the lights down low so that we could better observe the LED aurora borealis that was gently winking from the ceiling above. Instantly, and to everyone’s relief, the bath made a difference as my wife found herself more comfortable. 

“You’re doing amazing!” said Tina, and, munching pensively on a hazelnut, I immediately wished I’d thought of that one. See, she was. My wife had been amazing for every single second of the pregnancy, as her body changed shape, as normal became strange and she felt the first kicks and movement of another living thing inside her. Since she worried about how this new person we were about to meet would change our relationship and our lives and whether our daughter would end up with a British, Canadian or even German accent. Chances were that her first words would now be “You’re doing great!” anyhow.

An hour later however, and things were getting genuinely scary. My wife was now trying to eat her own hand and whenever I told her “You’re doing great!” she would take a moment out from screaming to reply with full conviction “NO I’M FUCKING NOT”. The baby’s heartbeat, along with that of everyone else in the room who wasn’t part of the medical team, was all over the place. My positive responses, which my wife had requested as part of her rapidly metamorphosing birth plan, now felt as irrelevant and useless as my man nipples. Genuine fear and horrible scenarios flashed through my mind as to how the final few moments of pregnancy were going to play out. As much I praised how well my wife was doing and helped her to focus by adding “relax your shoulders, relax your arms, relax your chest, relax your thighs” along with other unclenchably tense areas of her anatomy to my dialogue, there was a growing desperation inside me for things to move along as fast as they could, for someone to intervene. My male uselessness was now flapping, useless, soggy and ineffectively flaccid, in the hurricane. 

Thankfully, this was the point at which my wife requested pain relief. There was to be no going any further down this branch of the birth plan. It was time for plan E – the epidural. And so it was that, once the blessed pain-relieving drugs began to take effect and the screams of pain ceased, my wife took up a new position on a bed and a whole host of midwives and doctors gathered at the foot of it, gazing at my better half’s loins in excited anticipation. “You’re doing great!” I said to my wife – and this time she smiled back with eyes full of love and grasped my hand. “You’re going to be a Dad soon!” she said, and I had no clue what to do with this information other than to thank the universe for epidurals. Seconds later, she was being asked to push, and everyone in the room was telling her “You’re doing great!” As the encouragement grew I went around to check the business end of proceedings and was confronted with the sight of what looked like a hairy satsuma protruding from my wife’s vagina. And thus, I did gaze upon the back of my daughter’s head for the very first time.

“Oh my god, you’re doing great!” I exclaimed. My wife reached down to touch our baby’s head, squealing with delight as her fingers made contact. By now the doctor had laid herself across my wife’s ribcage and stomach in the style of a nightclub bouncer pinning a lager-powered miscreant to the floor. I assumed she was overcome with the emotion of it all or was trying to squeeze in for a better look, but “this is to stop the baby being sucked back in,” she assured me. Of course. “Great! Carry on!” I asked her. One final push came minutes later, as my wife, my amazing wife – who had only an hour before declared that she wanted to stop and that frankly this whole baby thing was just a stupid idea – virtually giggled out our child into the early hours of the Berlin morning. 

I got to cut the umbilical cord, and may have said “I now declare this branch of Lidl open,” as I did so. Morrisons wouldn’t have made sense in Germany. To be honest, I’m no longer sure if I did say it, and actually really hope I didn’t. But I might have because, well, I do weird things when I’m in day-long situations of heightened emotion, and I’m a bit of a dick. It’s a blur. 

All that mattered was that my wife was fantastic and there, cooing to herself as if nothing had happened and with her brand new life unpacking itself and beginning with each passing second, was our daughter. 

Our little girl.

Two weeks later and I’m happy to report that she’s doing great, as is her incredible Mum. 
We all are. And I’m now a nappy-changing, milky-vomit absorbing, baby-soothing, laundry-washing, dinner-cooking, formula-sourcing, feed-assisting, tinker, tailor, soldier, spy, lullaby-singing Dad and loving every minute of it. Finally, we’re a family.

We’re doing great.
Photo: Wikimedia Commons